MARKETS EXIST TO DIVIDE GAINS FROM TRADE. There are two important parts of the title. There must be gains from trade, meaning benefits to the buyer and the seller, and there must be an acceptable division of the gains between the buyer and the seller. For many years, this site has maintained that the one-contract-fits-all labor market, in which the employer pays a skilled worker a lot of money in exchange for all of that worker's waking hours (and many of the overnight hours as well) is inefficient, particularly for working moms.

Corporate America is catching on.

Baby boom moms largely worked out the details of flexible hours, telecommuting and the like with their bosses one at a time, behind closed doors, for fear of setting an apple-cart-upsetting precedent.

Their daughters, the current mothers of young children, are putting their expectations squarely on the table. Employers can respond with flexwork options, or they can look for someone else. If they don't offer flexwork, they might be doing a lot of looking.

So rather than look, some employers are considering a different division of the gains from trade.

"For many young mothers, it just didn't work for them that their mothers went to work. I hear that all the time: 'I'm not going to do that to my kids,' " says Susan Seitel, president of Work & Family Connection Inc., a publishing and consulting firm in Minnetonka, Minn.

Young moms say that they've got flexible attitudes about flexibility: They'll make it work for their employers, if their employers will make it work for them.

Such arrangements do not have the "stick-it-to-the-single-or-childless" property of mandatory leave policies for some people.

"I talk about this all the time with my friends from college and business school," says Slaughter, a 2005 graduate of the University of Chicago Business School who is an internal consultant with Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co.

Instead of being forced to accept or decline a job with non-negotiable hours and work culture, she says, "for our generation, we hope that there's the opposite - creative ways to make it work."

Each department at Northwestern Mutual offers a combination of work-life programs that meet its business demands, says Jean Towell, a company representative. Managers can decide if and how to use options such as job-sharing and compressed workweeks.

Some employers show understanding of the concept that the outputs, not the inputs, are what matter.

"All of the managers are doing the flextime," [Pyra Max Bank senior vice president of marketing and human resources Monica] Baker tells a reporter. "If someone wants to do four 10-hour days, they can. It's just the culture now, as long as the work is getting done and the bank is profitable."

Now to do something about that proliferation of vice presidents ...